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Friday, April 19, 2013

Bad SEO Client Case Study - Your SEO is Complete

The following Bad SEO Client Blog post is slightly embellished for entertainment purposes… but only slightly.

The client – we’ll call them “Super Awesome, Inc.” – needs SEO help. They sign on with us for a year. A year. One calendar year. 52 weeks, 365 days in succession. Their contract starts today; it ends a year from today. By the time we’re done with this client, we will have gone through all four seasons and we will all be a full year older. Let’s just keep that perspective in mind. Just to clarify, you, our loyal reader, are X years old as you read this. By the time this contract is done with Super Awesome, Inc., you will be X+1. That means you’ll be a full year older.

Let’s also keep in mind that Super Awesome, Inc. has spent the past 10 years fucking up their website. Buying links, stuffing keywords into alt tags, putting black text on a black background, etc. When they finally decide they need help, we say, “Great – we can help. We’ve picked apart your website a bit and see where a lot of the problems may be.”
Super Awesome, Inc’s CEO – we’ll call him “Jimmy D. Bag” – signs the agreement for a year and we get to work.

We have our first meeting with them 2 weeks into the project and show them the preliminary findings on their fucked-up site. In a nice way, we tell Mr. Bag, that his site is super-awesomely fucked up. It is no longer Super Awesome as their business name implies.

“Mr. Bag, in our preliminary research, these are the numerous problems we found with your site.”

After a few moments of uncomfortable silence and an angry sigh from their end of the conference line, Mr. Bag proceeds to ask a question which, in his mind, is a very eloquent one since he likes to think of himself as a no-nonsense, shoot-from-the-hip, tell-it-like-it-is kinda guy… not an ignorant, impatient asshole with no concept of reality. Indeed, his question is so profound in his mind that he believes he is about to turn the world of SEO on its head with his insightful revelation.

Bad client: “If you saw all these problems, why didn’t you fix them?!”